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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1162 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 2, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Watched Overman: The Meaning of Life on Eliezer Yudkowsky's mention. It was pretty good! Definitely at least as watchable as the average Hollywood superhero movie. I loved the part where Overman is flying around stealing random people's powers to a catchy tune, and at least the climax didn't come down to a big fistfight.

Eliezer's comments:

There goes Hollywood.

Context: I rolled my eyes and tried watching this AI gen YouTube suggested. It was kind of cliched and a bit predictable but I didn't downvote and leave immediately as I'd expected.

Then I looked up when it was done and 28 minutes had passed.

Ooh ooh, you spotted a flaw! Great! Remember when AIs couldn't draw hands WELL? But they could draw hands AT ALL? And then TIME happened and it was SIX MONTHS LATER?

I mean it is garbage but it is borderline sufferable which was not the case with previous attempts. That means that the moat of billion dollar productions will hold for another year probably maybe hopefully.

The pace of releases has increased relative to what it was three years ago.

Was surprisingly good visuals. Watched all the way through, would maybe watch similar style movies.

I've lately been watching movie recaps. Which are basically narrated 20-30 minute summaries of movies. It kinda felt like that at times. I might just be more interested in 30 minute stories lately. Hollywood settled on 90-120 minutes for a movie, i don't know if that was correct for all situations/stories.

Some summarizers in Japan have been getting nailed for copyright infringement.

Yeah similarly a fan of movie recaps especially for horror concepts since I'm not huge into jump scares but frequently curious how a given interesting trailer idea gets developed without wanting to sit through 90 minutes of movie which largely has nothing to do with the sci-fi or fantasy concept in play and is more gore and tension

I watched the whole, mostly amused at the similarity of part of the premise to a certain anime I watched many years ago.

I'm impressed, though. John's accent was a little inconsistent, but otherwise I didn't notice any of the old AI hallmarks. I'm hardly a connoisseur of AI video, though.

Call me a luddite but I preferred the original Brody Quest.

He beats the US armed forces handidly, his powers increase exponentially since then, but Japan's leader thinks she can nuke him. I suppose Chinese domestic natrative portrays Japan as being more indepedent from the US as it is in reality.

Chinese are appearently big on AI generated TV drama, at least according to this tweet which cites .cn sites, so I assume it is at least somewhat close to true.

the climax didn't come down to a big fistfight.

The "interdimensional entity", the last external adversary, is defeated by a literal punch.

Edit: The video linked by Yud was not uploaded by the movie's author and is geavily monetised, lots of ads. This one's uploader is the movie's director.

spoiler

I was wondering if one asian government was standing in for another one that the author couldn't talk about or criticize in any way without tripping censors.

It’s hard to tell how much of the residual strangeness is due to it being AI, and how much is due to it being a very Chinese production despite being set in America. The speech and behavior of characters is similar to that of American characters in Chinese films such as The Battle at Lake Changjin.

Having read some translated Wuxia/Xianxia the story beats felt very familiar.

This is cool! Don't have time to watch the whole thing since I'm about to go camping but I might watch it later. Doesn't look terrible.

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